“This cannot be the end.” There was something desperate and reckless in his tone now. “If I can’t have your hand, we can at least meet again—like this. It is not so difficult to arrange.”
It was the first she’d troubled to think of the arrangements he’d made. She’d become good at this life of deception. She’d mastered charm and manners and fashion. The Widow had thrown her into deep water, and she’d learned, out of necessity, to swim. But she still had difficulty thinking out all the consequences. And when she did not, men died.
“What did Bachmann do with André’s spies?” she asked warily. “The ones watching the house. Beaver Hat and Alley Loafer.”
“I am not a murderer, Kate. They are alive and well, but detained at His Majesty’s leisure. Montresor has been put in charge of building gun emplacements on Mud Island. The ditches flood nightly. The conditions are so bad that the soldiery will not stand for it, and the civilians will not work for the wages offered. So he press gangs his work crews. It will be at least a day, perhaps a week, before your unwelcome friends turn back up. We could come again tomorrow night.”
She wanted to. She wanted to spend her days looking forward to nights like this, but she couldn’t. “No. The Widow is right. If we continue to meet, sooner or later I’ll put a noose around your neck.”
“The Widow is a hypocrite. Donop wrote a letter before he died. I promised to deliver it. It is addressed to Angela Ferrers. But you should read it.”
He led her back upstairs and found the letter in his coat pocket, then pressed it into her hands. He took up a seat at the elegantly feminine dressing table, and Kate had to banish the easy domesticity of it from her mind. This would never be their future.
She climbed onto the bed with the letter. Which was a mistake, because somehow the scene took on an even more intimate aspect. But nothing to do with the Widow could be homey, so she read the letter. Then she read it again.
“They were lovers for nearly a year,” she said, trying to take it in, to reconcile the contradiction that was Angela Ferrers.
“Yes. Before you knew her, and then afterwards, while she was living in Orchard Valley. Even here in Philadelphia she managed to come to him. Always, as he said, on her own terms.”
“He wanted to marry her. He addresses her as his marchioness, but Donop was a count.” She was coming to realize that everyone had secrets, but the Widow’s were deeper than most.
“Carl told me she was once a woman of name and note. I suspect she has good reason for obscuring her origins.”
“I think she did love him,” Kate said. As I love you. And if she continued to meet him, they would end the same way. “But Angela took the warning to Mercer, all the same. She knew what might happen.”
“He didn’t blame her, Kate. They were both adults. They understood the rules of the game.”
“And you think we should play the same game. But, Peter, the difference is that I would blame myself.”
* * *
Bitter as it was, Peter Tremayne tried to stay away from her, but it proved impossible.
He did not want to dine or converse with Howe, and Howe’s pretty mistress, and Howe’s pretty mistress’s pandering husband. He did not want to listen to Montresor and his engineers carp about their lack of money and men, or endure the bitter smiles of the Hessian officers who resented Howe’s part in Carl Donop’s death and assumed Peter to be an ally because he’d had the decency to remain with the count to the end. He did not want to share a table with Captain André, who had tried to kill the woman he loved, or with Caide, whom he had just cuckolded. Most of all he did not want to dine with Kate, who had rejected his offer of marriage. But the river was open, and Philadelphia, at least that portion of it that was loyal, was rejoicing. Refusing Howe’s invitation to celebrate was out of the question.
The banquet was being held upstairs at the City Tavern in a private room painted pale green and hung with damask curtains of wheat gold. Kate was seated not three gilded chairs away from him—opposite Caide and flanked by the dashing Hessian Jaeger Captain Ewald and the Engineer Captain Montresor—talking gaily and flashing smiles at Howe, her fiancé, and the Hessians in equal measure. Her eyes, he could not help but note, glittered with more fire than the garnets at her wrist and ears.
Tremayne knew that just a week ago flour had been unavailable at any price and even salt pork had been scarce. Tonight there was roast beef seasoned with rosemary and salt, warm crusty bread with the sort of fresh butter Kate had swooned over at the Neck, duck in cherry sauce, apple tart and soft local cheese. He ate everything and tasted nothing. She ate very little. He saw her refuse the beef and accept only a slice of the duck. He noticed everything she did, his gaze returning to her like a bird to roost, over and over, until he had to force himself to fix his attention on the heart-shaped face of Mrs. Loring, who ignored the husband seated to her right and fed choice bits of meat to the lover seated on her left.
The conversation first bored, then disturbed him. Complaining about local conditions was the small change of military life. The casual dismissal of the Rebel army’s prowess was willful blindness. It had taken five thousand men, in the end, to capture Fort Mercer, and even then it could not be counted a total victory, because the Rebel garrison had spiked the guns and slipped away in the middle of the night. Three hundred Rebels had held two tumbledown fortifications against more than seven thousand British and Hessian Regulars for a month, and nearly every man of them lived to tell the tale.
Before the cheese was cleared he heard the music, drifting up from the open windows below. When their party moved downstairs to join in the dancing, Tremayne found himself trailing behind his cousin and Kate, Bay’s arm about her shoulders, his hand caressing her neck, impossible to ignore. When Tremayne realized he was staring and forced himself to look away, he found the Hessian Ewald at his side, his eyes studiously averted.
He supposed that to a country girl like Kate, raised a Quaker and unused to finery, the ballroom must be a dazzling spectacle. After ten weeks of dwindling supplies, chronic shortages, scarce provisions, and tainted meat, Philadelphia suddenly had every necessity—and a great many luxuries—in abundance. The chandeliers in the main hall were full of beeswax tapers, infusing the room with a faintly cloying aroma, but infinitely preferable to the stinking tallow that had become commonplace in even the wealthiest homes. The rum punch was strong, even if the limes were old and bitter, and the sugar had borne a faintly musty shipboard taste with it into the bowl. He was not tempted by the pastel iced cakes or the sweets frosted and glittering with castor sugar, but the brandy, although he had to leave the main room and seek it out in a tiny parlor filled with card tables, was excellent.
It surprised him to find Kate dancing when he returned. Nothing about her midnight blue silk robe à la française betrayed her Quaker origins, and she moved with the grace of a gypsy. Not in the mincing style of London dance masters, but with the full commitment of her entire body. First with a young lieutenant he dimly recollected to be titled and rich and named something birdlike, perhaps Sparrow or Finch. Then with Howe, who seemed to fancy himself in the role of doting uncle. Then with the altogether too handsome Ewald, who, Tremayne noted, had been watching her with his good eye all night. Ewald was harmless, but all the same, Tremayne would have to have a word there.
But of course he couldn’t. She was not his.
Her next partner was not harmless. And the man had not sought her out. She’d gone from the floor and returned with him in tow. If Tremayne lived to be a hundred, and the damned woman lived past this winter, he would never be able to predict her. She was at a large public event, well chaperoned, and had no reason to endure the attention of any man she did not wish to, let alone one who had tried to kill her. So why the hell was she dancing with John André?
* * *
I have come into the possession of certain letters,” Kate said, as she passed close to her partner.
She’d expected André to pale or stum
ble or express some surprise. Instead he turned her smoothly and executed his steps with a graceful flourish.
“Delightful,” he said. His gold-flecked eyes twinkled, and he smiled broadly. “Now you are supposed to hint at the dark secrets contained therein. Next, I blanch in terror, whilst you, to press your advantage, quote a salacious line or two.”
“You’re mocking me,” she said sourly.
“I am. I apologize. Blackmail is a serious business. By all means let us be dour and grim. Go on.”
“They are from a lover,” she said.
“Really? How droll. Please credit me with the good sense not to write compromising letters, and to instruct my lovers not to do so either.”
“The letters are filled with the effusions of first love for a man somewhat older than the sender, and they were written quite recently.”
“Forgeries,” he replied smoothly.
“There are drawings, informal sketches. They are intimate.”
He did not blanch, but the smile faded from his full lips, and Kate thought she detected something bittersweet and quickly buried in his gold-flecked eyes. “I can only presume your dear aunt sought out the writer, and encouraged this communication, no doubt vowing to see the missives delivered herself.”
It had not occurred to Kate how Angela Ferrers might have come into possession of the letters; that she might not have found them but encouraged their writing. The thought made her uneasy. “Something rather like that, I expect.”
“Oh, Miss Grey,” he scolded. “You don’t have the heart for this, do you? I resent and regret the card you’ve played, but I would expect no less. You can save your empathy. I assure you, I would have little enough for you if our positions were reversed. What do you think to demand in exchange for these letters?”
“I have no intention of handing them over to you. They are not in Philadelphia.”
“Very prudent. Next you are going to say that if you die or disappear, they will be sent to Howe. And perhaps the broadsheets?”
“Yes.”
“Also shrewd. But the difficulty with blackmail, Miss Grey, is that it is a weapon that can be fired but once. I grant that you have a loaded pistol pressed to my heart, but whom will you choose to save? Yourself, or Lord Sancreed?”
Her feet failed her. She nearly tripped, then stopped short, snarling the line of dancers for a second. Then André tugged her hand and turned her smoothly back into the steps. “Peter has done nothing,” she said when they next passed close.
“Nothing? He turned Phillip Lytton over to the enemy at Haddonfield, and held private parley with a notorious Rebel officer whose skirmishers and raids have plagued our supply lines for months. Recently it seems he slipped that same officer inside our lines for a private tête-à-tête at a small cottage in the Neck. But of course you know this, because you were there. I admit, had I known the Grey Fox was visiting our fair city, I’d have had a squadron of dragoons shadowing Tremayne.”
She felt suddenly queasy at the thought that one or more of André’s henchman had followed her and Peter to the Neck, had watched the cottage while they’d made love. “And if I give you the letters, what guarantee do I have of Peter’s safety?”
“None whatsoever, I’m afraid. The viscount’s safety rests upon your good behavior. I have plans for you, Miss Grey, and these no longer include Peter Tremayne. You must not see him again. Or I will make dead certain he hangs.”
She swallowed. She’d feared this, and now it had come to pass. And it would only be harder to give Tremayne up now that she knew what it was like to lie with him—to love and be loved by him. With relief she realized that the music was ending, and soon this harrowing interview would be over. “I think we understand each other.”
She tried to leave the floor, but he held her hand fast. “Not quite,” he said. “I wish you to know that my relationship with the boy went no further than the bounds of propriety, at least in a physical sense, but that my feelings were and are deeply engaged.”
She forgot her fear for a moment. “Why not?” She had failed utterly to anticipate her enemy, and she was beginning to realize that it was because she did not understand him.
“I was captured by your countrymen in Canada at the fall of Fort St. John. Myself and my fellow officers were marched to Pennsylvania and given our parole and the freedom to roam up to six miles from Lancaster, but it was not uncommon to be waylaid and beaten by gangs when we went about town. Those of us forced to shelter at the local inn were particularly vulnerable to attacks. The Cope family was kind enough to take me in and suffer the opprobrium of their neighbors for it. I could not abuse their hospitality by seducing their youngest son.”
“But you flirted with him,” she said, recalling Tremayne’s careful teasing at Grey Farm. He’d been a guest in her home, courteous but forthright in his desires. She did not believe André had more scruples than Tremayne.
“He was old enough to woo,” André replied, “but too young to bed.”
She knew there was more to it. “I have read the letters. He is seventeen. Girls marry at such an age, and no one thinks the worst of it. And you are not yet thirty. It is not so great an age difference.”
“Ah, but let us say we had consummated our love. The experience might have proved the forging of his preference, and not the expression of it. Virginity is a tricky beast.”
To her horror, she blushed. Had her hand been free she would have snapped open her fan and hidden her face, but a new song had begun and André’s grasp was like iron. He studied her as the steps of the dance carried him around her in a circle. “Oh, Miss Grey,” he said softly. “So the fruit was picked only recently. Was Peter Tremayne a gentle lover? Did you go to him willingly, or did he blackmail you into his bed?”
“You presume too much, Captain.”
“I asked you to call me John.”
Now it was her turn to circle him. “I seem to recall that you were attempting to kill me on that occasion. Forgive me if I took the request as stock villain’s banter.”
“The exigencies of the moment compelled me, but now we are in accord and can speak as friends. And I can admit that my admiration for you only grows. I assumed you’d bedded Tremayne in Orchard Valley, but now I learn that instead of besting him with your wiles, you blindsided him with your purity. A ruthless stratagem I cannot help but applaud. Come work for me, Miss Grey.”
“I will never work for you. And we are not friends.”
“Are we not? We are of an age. We have both had cause to reinvent ourselves. We alone know each other’s secrets. If not friends, what does that make us?” He dropped her hand at last, and Kate realized the music had ended. André did not wait for her answer, but bowed and allowed himself to be swept up into the press of men and women selecting their next partners.
He was wrong, she told herself as she sought the fresh air of the stairwell, and when even that proved too stuffy, the cool dark of the back porch where the crowd spilled noisily into the yard. Perhaps she was the only person in Philadelphia privy to the secrets of André’s heart, but he was not the only man in Philadelphia privy to hers.
Peter.
She’d tried to ignore him at dinner, but whenever her eyes lighted on him, she’d felt stripped bare, as though everyone who looked at her could tell that she’d given herself to him. They’d lain together naked like Adam and Eve in the Garden, and sweated and cried out and been as vulnerable as newborns in each other’s arms. And tonight they sat swathed in silk and lace at opposite ends of a mahogany table and pretended not to know each other. They drank wine and talked with other people who seemed to Kate to have all the substantiality of ghosts.
He’d betrayed Phillip Lytton for her, and committed treason as damning as her own. Every time their lives touched, she brought him danger and dishonor.
“I know a place where we can be alone. Will you come?”
She thought at first that she had imagined his voice in the dark of the garden, but then she realized tha
t he was standing behind her. She did not turn to face him. She said nothing. Her breath came fast, making a mist in the cool night air. He told her how to find the place, his directions precise and succinct, and then he was gone.
She resolved not to go to him and threaded her way back through the crowd in the yard. It had coarsened since she’d come outside. In the back hallway she noticed that the sound had changed subtly. Early in the night, all of Philadelphia had been abroad celebrating, but now the very young and the scrupulously virtuous had gone home. It was past midnight, and tipsy flirtation and mild wagering had given way to drunken propositions and high-stakes gaming. If she turned into the taproom under the stairs, she knew, she would find Caide betting on a fight, or stripping to the waist to take part in one.
The fall of Mercer and Mifflin, and the opening of the Delaware being celebrated tonight, had destroyed everything she had worked for since coming to Philadelphia. But it had bought her one priceless thing: time. She did not have to marry Caide right away. Pray God she did not have to marry him at all.
She ought to float to Bay’s side on a tide of rustling silk and admire his skill or his winnings, allow him to show her off the way he liked to when the company was becoming informal. He might draw her down to his lap and balance his glass on her busk, the condensation running in rivulets down her breasts.
Instead, she opened the door to the cellar. At the bottom she found a long brick corridor painted shimmering white, stretching the length of the tavern from back to front. She followed it past haphazardly stocked storerooms, disordered by the recent influx of goods from the supply ships. Behind one half-shut door she heard the fervent urgings of a vigorous tryst, and hurried farther, until she reached the door Tremayne had described.
Batten oak and brined with age and the proximity of the docks, it nonetheless opened silently on oiled hinges. A smuggler’s passage; two hundred narrow feet of smooth paving lined with boxes of contraband. It led straight to the river.
There was already a light burning in the tunnel, though there were no beeswax or spermaceti tapers here. It was rushlight, stinking of tallow and smoking like a forge. Her lover—and she realized with shock that was precisely what he was—lounged in the middle of the passage, ankles crossed, head down, shoulder negligently grazing a stack of wine crates. He looked up when she approached, and his expression of hope mixed with hunger gripped her like a vise. “I wasn’t certain you would come,” he said.
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